Ensure your food choices alleviate animal suffering,

rather than perpetuate cruelty. If you consume animal

products, buy from humane family farms where animals
are not confined to cages or crates, and where they
can roam freely and behave naturally. Contact AWI
and request copies of our Animal Welfare Approved
husbandry standards. Take the criteria to managers of
your local grocery stores and restaurants and urge them
to provide products from animals raised according to
a high welfare standard. Use customer comment cards
to show that you care about farm animal welfare and
to educate others. Animal factories cannot exist if
consumers demand that animals raised for food are
treated as sentient beings, with dignity and respect.
Contact your Members of Congress and request
strong enforcement of the Humane Slaughter Act.
Respectfully suggest that USDA inspectors work fulltime at each slaughter plant to observe the unloading,
handling, stunning and killing of the animals. Write
to: The Honorable (full name of Senator), US Senate,
Washington, DC 20510; The Honorable (full name
of Representative), US House of Representatives,
Washington, DC 20515. Contact AWI for the names of
your Members of Congress.

Animal Welfare Institute

ABOUT US

The Animal Welfare Institute is a non-profit charitable

organization that was founded in 1951 to reduce the sum
total of pain and fear inflicted on animals by humans. We
seek to replace factory animal production with farming
methods that are both humane and responsible.

Animal Welfare
Institute
P.O. Box 3650, Washington, DC 20027
(703) 836-4300; fax: (703) 836-0400; www.awionline.org
Printed with Envirotech ink on recycled paper

cover: Laurie Smith

Previously
denied their
basic needs,
animals
released
from factory
confinement
instinctively
express natural
behaviors such
as nest building
by hens.

Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary

Steve Reid/www.flickr.com/photos/picstever/sets/72157600910904279/

Animal factories devour fresh water and produce

massive amounts of liquefied manure, stored in cesspools
that routinely contaminate public waters with feces
and pathogens.

Fa r m A n i m a l s

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

During transport, lack of protection from extreme

weather, mixing of unfamiliar animals, overcrowding,
poor driving, and long periods without food or water
cause injuries and sometimes the deaths of animals.
The Humane Slaughter Act directs the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) to ensure that pigs,
cows, sheep, goats and horses are rendered insensible
to pain before being killed. However, the Act excludes
poultry and animals killed for ritual slaughter. Even
for protected species, the law is blatantly flouted at
some large slaughterhouses. The drive to increase
profits has led plants to increase the number of
animals slaughtered per hour. Consequently, animals
are sometimes scalded, skinned and dismembered
without having been properly stunned.
Industrial agriculture is inherently inhumane,
but cruelty to animals is not the only consequence of
treating animals as machines. Factory-raised animals
are routinely administered non-therapeutic levels of
antibiotics to promote growth and control health
problems that develop under hostile, factory conditions. Not only do residues of the drugs sometimes
end up in the meat, but the inappropriate use of antibiotics also enables bacteria to develop resistance to
antibiotics, giving rise to superbugs and diseases.
Factory production concentrates tremendous
amounts of manure in small areas. Unlike human
waste, there is no requirement to treat waste from
farm animals. Their manure is collected and stored
in vast quantities, creating environmental and health
hazards. Liquid manure cesspools have overflowed and
their earthen liners routinely leak into groundwater.
The cruelty of industrial animal agriculture
affects us all.

Fa r m A n i m a l s

the outdoors is contrary to their biological and social

natures and commonly leads them to peck harmfully at
each others feathers and bodies.
To address the situation, a substantial portion of each
hens beak is cut off. This makes it difficult for her to eat
and can cause lifelong pain. At the end of a laying cycle,
hens naturally molt, shedding their feathers. In order to
force a molt artificially and promote an additional laying
cycle, hens are deprived of food and water for up to two
weeks. When production of eggs drops off, the hens are
killed. In the process of hatching and raising chicks to
replace them, just as many males as females are born.
The unwanted male chicks are callously ground up alive
or thrown into trashcans, where they suffocate when
other chicks are piled on top of them.
Broilers, as the industry refers to chickens raised
for meat, spend relatively short lives in warehouses
containing thousands of birds. Bred for rapid growth
and large breast size, they are predisposed to disease
and crippling physical abnormalities. Many birds die
of heart attacks. Others eventually die from
dehydration or starvation because they cannot stand
or walk to feeders.
Pigs are intelligent and highly social. They
keep clean in the wild and maintain separate areas
for defecating, resting and eating. Pregnant sows
instinctively gather materials to build nests in which to
give birth. Yet, in industrialized facilities, they spend
each of their nearly four-month pregnancies confined
to a gestation cratea stark, metal enclosure that is
scarcely wider and longer than the sow herself. The
sow is so restricted that she is unable to walk or turn
around, much less socialize. She develops abnormal
behaviors and suffers from leg problems and skin

Animal Welfare Institute

Agriculture: Past and Present

Over 9 billion animals are raised and slaughtered

for food annually in America. Each is a living,
feeling individual capable of experiencing pleasure
and pain.
Half a century ago, family farms were prevalent.
Animals grazed on pasture, breathing fresh air and
feeling the sunshine on their backs. During inclement
weather, they were sheltered in straw-bedded barns.
In contrast, the rearing of farm animals today is
dominated by industrialized facilities that maximize
profits by treating animals not as sentient creatures,
but as production units. Raised by the thousands
at a single site, animals are confined in such tight
quarters that they can scarcely move, let alone
behave normally.

THe CruelTY of Animal Factories

Chickens have an innate desire to stretch their wings,

perch, dust-bathe, forage for food, and run. Hens
instinctively want to build nests in which to lay their
eggs. In the egg industry, a hens every pleasure is
denied. Four or five of the birds are packed into a
battery cage, a wire enclosure so small that none
can spread her wings. The cages are stacked sideby-side, row upon row, in long windowless sheds.
Housing hens densely in cages or without access to

Marlene Halverson/AWI

Diane Halverson/AWI

Humane Farming Association

Confined to cramped wire cages in factories, laying hens

experience severe feather loss, and their beaks are seared
off with a hot blade in an attempt to reduce the impact of
stress-induced feather-pecking.

lesions due to relentless confinement on concrete

floors. Over time, her muscles deteriorate and she
may develop osteoporosis.
The sow is also crated during delivery and for
the short period in which her piglets are allowed to
nurse. She is deprived of bedding for building a nest
and foraging. Male pigs kept for breeding purposes
are also often housed individually in crates or barren
pens. Growing pigs are confined to slatted, bare
concrete floors. Stressed by crowding and boredom,
the pigs behave aggressively and seek stimulation.
They frequently turn to biting the tails of penmates.
Consequently, their tails are routinely cut off soon
after birth.
Milk production is increasingly industrialized. In
factory dairies, cows often have their tails cut off, are
denied pasture, instead spending their entire lives
confined on concrete. Lactating cows are injected
with the synthetic growth hormone rBGH to boost
milk production. The hormone causes tremendous
stress on their bodies, and if the diet is not adequate,
calcium is leached from the cows bones, predisposing
them to lameness. Cows injected with rBGH have a
higher incidence of mastitis, a painful infection of the
udder, than their non-injected counterparts do.
Female calves born to these cows will also be
used for milking, but male calves have no value to
a specialized dairy factory. Typically, they are sent
to slaughter within 48 hours after birth, or they are
sold and raised for veal. In veal factories, calves
are confined for four months to barren crates and
tethered to the floor. Unable to walk or turn around,
they are fed a liquid diet, intentionally deficient in
iron, to create milk-fed veal.

In industrialized facilities, sows spend most of their bleak

lives in coffin-sized crates where they must stand and sleep
on concrete slatted floors devoid of bedding so that their
manure can be readily collected and liquefied.

Cows on this factory dairy are not permitted to graze on

pasture; instead they stand, walk and rest on concrete. Their
tails are cut off so that the manure-laden switches do not get
in workers faces.